Teaching Personal Pronouns

Personal Pronouns & Autism

Many children, like my son Jack who are Autistic, struggle to understand what may be considered “abstract” parts of speech & language such as personal pronouns.

Personal Pronouns include; I, you, he, she, it, we, they, and who.

I have been focusing recently on Personal Pronouns with my second son Jack as he was very confused when referencing males and females during play activities and in his daily life.

If you have been following me over on Instagram you will know that on the daily I am sharing videos and posts of how I educate my autistic sons at home in the evenings. (You can watch some of my videos here.) One post that I received a lot of feedback about was this post about Personal Pronouns & Feelings.

I created a Pronoun Sorting Printable that proved very beneficial for hands on learning with Jack, which I am sharing in this blog post for FREE!

✅ Ensure student can understand the difference between boy/girl and he/she.

✅ Using the @superduperpub Feelings Deck we go through all the cards, identifying the feelings that are being displayed- I sometimes use a tabletop mirror and imitate what is expressed in the photo card and encourage Jack to do the same.

✅ Using the Pronoun Sorting Printable we sort through the Feelings Deck by gender, placing the correct card and using the correct pronoun. “He is happy”.

✅ I provide a collection of mini figures and ask Jack to sort them into the correct gender while also using the correct pronouns.

✅ Using miniature toys I instruct Jack to give “him”(the boy on the Pronoun Sorting Printable) the “green” car, and follow up after he has given “him” (as in the boy) the car with the correct pronoun by confirming “He has the green car.

✅ Using images cut out of magazines and newspapers I ask Jack to if the person in the image is a “He or a She”, I then ask him to place the person in the correct category using the Pronoun Sorting Printable.